Though the example uses feminism, adoptees also frequently experience similar criticisms. So, just a little PSA for anyone in an adoption or foster care related group or community – note, I have not had a problem of this sort in my efforts here.
First of all, what constitutes “tone policing” and second of all, why tone policing isn’t a healthy way to address marginalized people from the privileged position. Tone policing is telling a marginalized individual (like adoptees) that they should speak respectfully to their oppressors (for any reason).
A common form of tone policing is one person telling a justifiably angry (or even triggered) person that foster and adoptive (including hopeful) parents “learn best” when they are spoken to in a gentle tone. This is an example of foster and adoptive parents using their privilege to force submission from the marginalized person. You don’t think of it that way, but that is absolutely what you are doing.
Foster and adoptive parents become allies by learning boundaries from an adoptee or former foster care youth’s harsh tone. While it isn’t always easy, it is necessary to face the realities of these lived experiences without asking them to moderate their tone. These privileged people do not “learn best” from a gentle or more submissive tone.
Marginalized people (adoptees and former foster care youth) have spent their entire lives performing. By that, I mean they are forced to conform to the standards set by privileged people in order to appease them. If they do not, they are accused of being angry, bitter, and advised to seek professional help.
When you ask them to “code-switch” (changing aspects of conversation to fit in or gain acceptance) in order to make you, the privileged powerful person, more comfortable, you are forcing them to conform to your ideal of what the submissive, grateful adoptee or former foster youth is supposed to look like. You are forcing them to conform to your vision and version of who they are meant to be.
The best thing you can do is listen to their voices and understand that they are sharing their lived experience with you and often in spite of difficult emotions related to those experiences.
This really does make me think of my mom’s life with her adoptive mother . . . and then there is that painting of me . . . the story below is not my own, though at the bottom is a snippet about me as well.
It took a near death experience (21 days intubated for covid pneumonia while pregnant) and the loss of my 3 year old the very day I came home from the hospital for me to admit I even needed therapy. Though the therapist accepted me based on my grief trauma, most of our time has been spent discussing my childhood.
So many pieces finally fell into place this week. It’s like I wasn’t even aware I HAD all the pieces I needed, much less did I know where to put them. I did some sleuthing to try to get a clearer picture of my very early childhood, because my story was withheld from me and only presented in a very fragmented way.
The messages and calls to the courthouse, the man listed as father on my birth certificate, my sister, her stepmother, and finally the man who raised me yielded little in the way of real answers. The woman who physically abused me caught wind that I was digging and contacted me. She sent FOUR PAGES on bullshit which started off as a sideways apology and ended with her basically saying it was my fault she tortured me. I was 2.
“Dad” (guy who raised me, my sister’s uncle) came the closest to answering my questions of them all. We hadn’t talked for 3 years prior to this. Even when I nearly died, he wouldn’t reach out to check on me. He included in his message a sappy story about how much he sacrificed for me. He insinuated I didn’t care about my sister’s pain, and he closed with a reprimand about how I should feel sorry for HIM because he lost a grandchild. He only met my son once, by his own choice.
My first few years with them were a fantasy. “Mom” hand made my clothes. I looked like I belonged in a magazine. My hair was brushed and arranged until it was glossy ringlets. There were ribbons, bows, ruffles, tights, pinafores, and patent leather shoes. My bedroom was fit for a princess. There was a 4 post bed with a canopy. It was white with burnished gold accents, as was the matching vanity and stool. The bed covering was white and pink ruffles, and the canopy was tailor made to match. Christmas, Easter, and birthdays looked like the toy store exploded into our living room. I had it all.
Once I reached that awkward, gangly phase, it was over. By then they had their own daughter and son, and I was a nuisance. No longer a doll they could dress and pose. I could sense their disappointment. Their delight in me was gone. So I tried harder. I won more awards, I practiced music longer, I earned higher scores in school. The more I tried, the more disgusted they seemed.
I looked back over all the big milestones that mark the transition from childhood to maturity. In my high school graduation photos, he looked angry. In my wedding photos, he looked sick. When my children were born, he didn’t want to see them. When I chose a path for how I would spend my life, it wasn’t good enough. When I chose to move to a new state with better opportunities, I was being foolish. When he finally came to visit my first house, he literally became ill and vomited all over my bathroom.
I failed them. By growing up, I failed them. They treated their children like people, and they celebrated them appropriately in both youth and adulthood. I finally put it all together this week and realized I’ve intentionally kept myself small in my mind, because somewhere deep down I knew that only as their little princess could I feel their love.
I dug through my old pictures and found so many of me paraded in beauty pageants. But this is the one I settled on. It was taken the month after they got custody of me, in their home. I told her – little Sandi – that her work is done. It was never her job to make me palatable to the parents who stole me. I understand why she did. Her life was an exercise in terror, and these white knights were her ticket to salvation. But it was never her job to earn their love, and that isn’t her job now. So she has my permission to rest peacefully. I grew within the soil where they planted this little seed. It’s my turn to do the work of deciding who is worthy of my best efforts.
From the blog author – As a young child, my mom’s adoptive mother dressed and arranged me for a large oil painting portrait she wanted to do of me but now having read today’s story, it speaks volumes. And my mom did have a princess bedroom with a four poster bed. I know that my mom had a very “challenging” relationship with her adoptive mother. She really didn’t share many details of her childhood with me. That probably means something significant as well.
Clearly, I did not for see all of the criticism that I was getting myself into but I did note that it was “a difficult topic to discuss in a politically correct manner”, so I did have an inkling. Five women expressed a problem with yesterday’s blog. There were literally hundreds of comments posted on the question thread. My blog yesterday attempted to acknowledge I am the product of a different time than the one I am living in now. I also posted a link to that blog in my all things adoption group. This caused my blog to have 10 times more views than any I have ever written here but no comments were left on the blog itself that I know of today.
Without apologizing for viewing the culture I was raised in positively, and I do continue to raise my own children within the same kind of family structure, I was shocked by the accusations of homophobia made against me within my all things adoption group simply for believing in the value of that culture as applied to child-rearing, a culture that includes both male and female role models. Please note – this does not exclude same sex couples but those do need to include extended family to provide examples of each gender, for a child growing up within that culture.
Needless to say, the increase in young people who refuse to embrace a gender identity (non-binary) is a trend for humanity that I don’t expect to end. It is a good response. Making a significant point about how gender is actually a meaningless distinction except in actual procreation. I completely agree with that stance. I have enough life experience to know that sex is sex, regardless of the forms it takes, though rape is something else entirely and about power over another human being. I am also aware that many young people do not intend to parent or have children. Many of my friends, who are in my same age group, lament not expecting to enjoy having grandchildren. Just as with abortion and now the pandemic, these are circumstances that have pushed back concerns about over-population.
Certainly, my family and my dearest friends include people who identify as gay and they are all loved by me just as any other family member or friend is. I see their humanity and accept them as they present themselves to be. For that, I was told to STOP tokenizing my gay family and friends. You sound like the obviously racist people who say “I can’t be racist, I have a black friend.” That was not my intent but I know, life is like this now. Sometimes we can’t undo perceptions, regardless of where our heart actually is. I accept the impossibility of doing so. Social media is a difficult place to even attempt that.
It was also said of this blog that on the whole the writing was disjointed and convoluted making it difficult to discern its intentions.
So I will make clear – my intention regarding the adoption related values most important to me – that were raised by this question that was asked – What are your thoughts about the Buttigieg’s impending adoption?
Adoption causes trauma by separating a baby from its gestational mother. Surrogacy does the same thing.
I support family preservation. This includes financial and emotional support, so that mothers can raise their own children. If a child does need the care of people who they are not born of, for all of the reasons usually given including abuse or neglect, this can be provided without changing their name and parentage from that shown on their original birth certificate. Birth identity matters.
In the case of the Buttigiegs their intention is to remain anonymous. I doubt that is going to succeed in the long run, though actual results will be the proof. The press will turn over every stone they try to set in order to reveal the child’s origins.
In a Washington Post article it was written – “The couple, who have been married for three years, had been trying to adopt for a year, taking part in parenting workshops. They were on lists that would allow them to receive a baby who had been abandoned or surrendered at short notice and also were seeking to be matched with a prospective mother.”
So to be clear, I like the former mayor, now cabinet member, Pete Buttigieg well enough, what little I actually know about him. But the language used in the couple’s announcement included lots of red flags for anyone interested in adoption reform. And the fact that they’re pursuing domestic infant adoption is precisely what I object to the most.
Research indicates that children with same sex parents have strengths and unique challenges. I found this article in an attempt to add some reality to my own thinking – “Same Sex Parents and Their Children“. It notes that between 1 and 9 million children in the United States have at least one parent who is lesbian or gay. There are approximately 594,000 same-sex partner households, according to the 2000 Census, and there are children living in approximately 27 percent of those households.
Adoptees definitely have unique traumas and I do have concerns about this particular couple’s ability create a totally positive outcome, from the trauma they will cause by the adoption of a baby. I would have the same concerns regardless of the sexual orientation of an adoptee’s parents.
Just in time for Mother’s Day, I finished reading Celeste Ng’s book. I don’t think any author could do a better job of weaving in EVERY topic I’ve ever spent writing a blog about in this effort. She manages to address transracial adoption, abandonment, infertility, surrogacy and abortion before the book is completed. Race and class underline all the characters and how they interact with each other.
I spent the last few days unable to attend to my own research for my own manuscript in process because I was so very engrossed in this story and could not stop reading.
I will try not to spoil it because you should read it for yourself. I learned about it through an adoption group I belong to and not because of the book per se but because of the TV series. I don’t know how close that series was able to stay to the book but I don’t get commercial TV here.
It is a story about mothers and today we celebrate Mother’s Day. These women’s stories interweave and clash in different, sometimes shocking, sometimes deeply moving ways. At the heart of the drama is a court case trying to resolve the difficult question of who “deserves” to be a mother. I would say there is no such thing as “deserving” to be a mother. One either is or one is not.
The author has friends who’ve conceived easily, who’ve struggled to conceive, who’ve adopted or gone through invasive IVF procedures or used surrogates, or who’ve decided not to conceive. Ng says – “The main constant seems to be judgment. Motherhood seems to be a no-win battle: however you decide to do (or not do) it.”
She continues, “Someone’s going to be criticizing you. You went to too great lengths trying to conceive. You didn’t go to great enough lengths. You had the baby too young. You should have kept the baby even though you were young. You shouldn’t have waited so long to try to have a baby. You’re a too involved mother. You’re not involved enough because you let your child play on the playground alone.”
“It never ends.” And I personally know ALL of that is true.
Ng concludes her thoughts with this insight – “We give women less information about their bodies and reproduction, less control over their bodies, and less support during and after pregnancy – and then we criticize them fiercely for whatever they end up doing.”
Celeste Ng writes in such a skillful manner that I feel humbled in my own attempts in comparison. I cannot recommend her book enough to do it’s brilliance justice but do – read it – if you have not already.
Missing Mom 